A Rope and a Prayer (13 page)

For the first time in days, I feel tears well up. As a new wife, having the endorsement of David’s parents means a lot. I am thankful for their support and trust. And it is a relief not to bear the burden of this decision alone.

Lee and I tell the FBI and DOD that if a raid is feasible, our family supports it.

A
young Taliban driver with shoulder-length hair gets behind the wheel of the vehicle. Glancing at me suspiciously in the rearview mirror, he starts the engine and begins driving down the left-hand side of the road. It is some sort of prank, I hope, some jihadi version of chicken—the game where two drivers speed toward each other in the same lane until one loses his nerve. If he’s not playing a game, which lane he drives down shows what country we are in. If he continues driving on the left, we have crossed into Pakistan. If he drives on the right, we are still in Afghanistan.

A mile down the road, a traffic sign appears in Urdu, the official language of Pakistan.

We’re in Pakistan, I think to myself. We’re dead.

Instead of taking us to Helmand as he promised, Atiqullah has brought us to Pakistan’s tribal areas, an infamous belt of Taliban-controlled territory. In the months ahead, I will learn that the fundamentalist Taliban state the United States purportedly toppled in 2001 is alive and thriving. The loss of thousands of Afghan, Pakistani, and American lives and billions in American aid has merely moved the Islamic emirate a few miles east into Pakistan, not eliminated it.

During the 1980s, the American, Saudi, and Pakistani governments used the tribal areas as a base to train hard-line Islamic guerrillas and launch cross-border raids on Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Thirty years later, the area’s roughly 3 million people are isolated, impoverished, and dominated by religious conservatives—and form a perfect base for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Through seven years of reporting in the region, I have pitied captives imprisoned here. It is arguably the worst place on earth for an American to be a hostage. The United States government has virtually no influence and is utterly despised. Since 2004, dozens of missiles fired by American drones have killed hundreds of militants and civilians. The Taliban have held Afghan, Pakistani, and foreign hostages in the area for years, seemingly immune to outside pressure.

“We’re in Pakistan,” I say out loud in the car, venting my anger.

Atiqullah, our kidnapper, laughs, and the driver appears surprised.

“How does he know it’s Pakistan?” the driver asks.

“Because you’re driving down the left-hand side of the road,” I answer.

“How do you know that?” the driver asks, immediately suspicious. “When were you in Pakistan before?”

Atiqullah smiles and appears amused by the conversation. He knows from our conversations and my passport that I have been to Pakistan many times on reporting trips. For years, I have watched the Pakistani government largely stand by as the Taliban murder hundreds of tribal elders and seize control of the area. An abstract foreign policy issue is now deeply personal. When my wife and family learn that I am in the tribal areas, their distress will increase exponentially. They will not expect me to return.

The mountainous area that spans the border represents the gravest single security threat the United States faces. Seven years after being driven from Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have reestablished their training camps in the area. Terrorism experts I have interviewed predict that the next major terrorist attack on the United States will come from the tribal areas of Pakistan.

We arrive in a large town, and I notice a sign that says “Wana” in English. Wana is the capital of South Waziristan, the most radical of the seven administrative districts that make up the tribal areas. Its most powerful Taliban commander is Baitullah Mehsud, a widely feared Pakistani militant blamed for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and a wave of suicide bombings that killed or wounded an estimated 5,000 Pakistanis over the last year.

We stop in the main bazaar, and I am left alone in the car with the young driver. Desperate rationalizations swirl through my mind. Our captors want a ransom and prisoners. Killing us gets them nothing. The three of us will survive. These are all delusions, of course. Simply getting us this far is an enormous victory for the Taliban. We could be held here for months or killed.

Outside the car, dozens of Pakistani tribesmen and Afghan and foreign militants mill around. Each carries a Kalashnikov assault rifle on his shoulder. Some wear thick black turbans or white prayer caps on their heads. Others wear camouflage jackets. All appear grim faced and menacing. A man with a large turban stops, peers at me in the backseat, and asks the driver a question in Pashto. The driver looks at me and says a sentence that I think includes the word for martyr. I tell myself the driver has said I am on my way to heaven.

Atiqullah gets back into the car and I feel relief for no rational reason. He has kidnapped us, but more and more I desperately view Atiqullah as my protector, the man who will continue to treat us well as other militants call for our heads.

 

 

As we drive deeper into the tribal areas, we enter a region that has been battered and neglected by the Pakistani government—and the world—for centuries. A backwater roughly the size of Massachusetts, the tribal areas are dominated by Pashtun tribes known for their independence, criminality, and fighting skills. Afghan, British, and Pakistani forces have all failed to gain firm control of the area. For centuries, bandits, smugglers, and kidnap rings have used it as a base.

The tribes that inhabit the Pakistani side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region are the most independent of the Pashtun belt. In Afghanistan, the Pashtun tribes have generally accepted the writ of the national government, in large part because they played a large role in choosing it. For Pashtuns, the term “Afghan” is a synonym for the word “Pashtun.” Tajiks and other ethnic groups that inhabit northern and western Afghanistan, in turn, view “Afghan” as a broad term applying to all inhabitants of president-day Afghanistan.

On the Pakistani side of the border, the Pashtuns have long been alienated from the national government and neglected by it. Pashtuns complain that Punjabis, who are the country’s largest group and make up 45 percent of the population, dominate Pakistan’s national government. Pashtuns are Pakistan’s second largest ethnic group and represent 15 percent of Pakistan’s people.

The true origins of the Pashtuns are a mystery. They are one of the least studied ethnic groups in the world and follow an oral tradition in which history is passed from generation to generation in folktales and sayings. According to Pashtuns, all tribes trace their lineage back to a single man, Qais Abdur Rashid, who traveled from present-day Afghanistan to seventh-century Arabia, met the prophet Muhammad, and converted to Islam. The names of his descendants are reflected in the names of Pashtun tribes, with “Ahmedzai,” for example, meaning “sons of Ahmed” and “Yusufzai” meaning “sons of Yusuf.”

Researchers believe that the present-day Pashtun tribal structure goes back thousands of years. For millennia, Pashtun elders ruled tribes. Elders are expected to be well spoken, generous, and brave, and are selected on the basis of family lineage and the individual’s ability to help his tribe flourish. If they protect and obtain wealth for a village, their standing soars. If they fail, they lose face. Lengthy jirgas—meetings of tribal elders—settle disputes by consensus and strive to prevent blood feuds. And wealthy tribal elders support impoverished tribesmen by hiring them as field workers. Elders also punish tribesmen who disobey their rulings or commit a crime. In its own way, the tribal system creates order.

The division that foreign visitors noticed in “Little America” between educated urban Pashtuns and conservative rural Pashtuns spans the Pashtun belt and includes those in the tribal areas of Pakistan as well. Pashtuns from a group of tribes known as the Durrani are generally more urbanized and liberal and more accepting of central government rule. Pashtuns from a group of tribes known as the Ghilzai tend to be more disenfranchised, live in rural areas, resist central government rule, and more numerous than the Durrani. Many of the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan are Ghilzai, while many current and past government leaders, including Karzai, are Durrani. While some western scholars highlight the division, the Taliban and many Pashtuns deny that such a rivalry exists.

The creation of the tribal areas dates back to the hated 1848 British demarcation of the 1,600-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which divided the Pashtuns. The British annexed six Ghilzai-dominated mountain districts along the border with Afghanistan and then declared them “tribal areas” as opposed to “settled areas” under firmer administrative control. Hoping to subdue the area’s dozen major tribes, British colonial officials enacted an indirect system of government.

Under the system, British-appointed administrators known as political agents maintained loose control of the tribal area’s inhabitants by applying a system of collective punishment. When an individual tribesman committed a crime or defied the government, political agents negotiated only with tribal elders—known as maliks—and demanded that the tribe arrest the wanted person. If that failed, the political agent used the Frontier Corps—a British-paid militia frequently made up of members of rival tribes—to punish a tribe en masse by withdrawing government funds or bulldozing homes. After a carefully calibrated punishment, the status quo resumed.

Twelve years after the creation of the new system of collective punishment, British officials complained that it was failing to stop raids and kidnappings from the tribal areas into Dera Ismail Khan and other nearby towns. “They kidnapped children from the very town of Dera Ismail Khan and demanded exorbitant sums for their release,” Brigadier General Chamberlain complained in an 1860 government report. “And if the relations of the captives delayed to ransom them, they cut off their fingers and sent them to their relations to move their tender feeling.”

Unbowed, the British launched a series of punitive military campaigns to try to again pacify the tribal areas. Thousands of tribesmen and hundreds of British and Indian soldiers perished in battles that achieved mixed results.

In 1897, an ambitious young British army officer named Winston S. Churchill served as a journalist in an expeditionary force dispatched to punish rebellious tribes. The result was Churchill’s first nonfiction book:
The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War
. Littered with openly racist statements, the book catapulted the future British prime minister and World War II leader to fame. It described Pashtuns as barbarians who showed a remarkable ability to embrace modern technology and brutally employ it.

“To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer,” Churchill wrote. “At a thousand yards the traveler falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle. His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.”

The book accurately captures a Pashtun tendency toward deeply destructive infighting. In one passage, Churchill describes the fate of a successful tribal leader, referring to him as a “Pathan,” the Urdu term for Pashtun.

“His success is now his ruin,” Churchill wrote. “A combination is formed against him. The surrounding chiefs and their adherents are assisted by the village populations. The ambitious Pathan, oppressed by numbers, is destroyed. The victors quarrel over the spoil, and the story closes, as it began, in bloodshed and strife.”

A Pashto proverb that I had heard conveys the same sentiment: “When the one profits,” it states, “the other’s house is ruined.”

The British struggles continued long after Churchill’s departure. In one widely heralded case, a Pashtun from North Waziristan known as the Faqir of Ipi led a tribal rebellion for more than twenty years. From 1937 until his death in 1960, he successfully eluded capture by the British and Pakistani governments. At one point in the 1940s, 40,000 British and Indian troops—backed by squadrons of British airplanes—hunted him.

Despite complaints that the policy kept the area impoverished and isolated, Pakistan retained the system of collective tribal punishment after it won independence from Britain in 1947. Under the country’s new constitution, Pakistani laws did not apply in the tribal areas unless specifically decreed by Pakistan’s president. Its people were barred from voting in Pakistan’s national elections. The 3 million people of the tribal areas had no elected representatives in Pakistan’s parliament.

Over the next twenty years, many tribal elders pocketed development funds doled out to them by Pakistani-government-appointed political agents. In order to maintain power, they discouraged education and most contact with the outside world. The result was that an estimated 83 percent of the men and 97 percent of the women in the tribal areas were illiterate—vastly higher rates than in the rest of Pakistan, where roughly half the population could read.

In the 1980s, the United States and Saudi Arabia poured approximately $1 billion a year into weaponry and military aid to mujahideen fighters in the tribal areas. Pakistan’s premier military intelligence service, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, oversaw the distribution of guns and cash. Acting as kingmaker, the ISI turned young Afghan and Pakistani fighters into hugely powerful military commanders, slashing the power of Pashtun tribal elders. Pakistani intelligence officials feared that the tribal elders wanted to secede from Pakistan, join their Pashtun brethren in Afghanistan, and create “Pashtunistan.”

At the same time, Pakistani intelligence officials introduced a new interpretation of Islam that further undermined the strength of the Pashtun tribal elders. With assistance from Pakistani intelligence officials, Saudi Arabia constructed religious schools that created another source of authority—fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam. When Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, three sets of power brokers now existed in the tribal areas: young mujahideen commanders, radical clerics, and traditional elders.